March 13, 2009

This tutorial covers 2 topics. The first is XML searching of assets. Many of the assets customers manage often contain XML artifacts. RAM indexes a variety of artifacts so you that can search for them based on their contents. Some examples of the supported artifact types are XML, Microsoft PPT, Visio, Excel, Adobe PDF and many more. In the versions prior to RAM v7.1.1, you could search on a term like “carlos” and select the search option”within artifacts” and RAM would return all assets that had artifacts that include the term “carlos”. The challenge is what if there were 100’s of assets that had “carlos”? In RAM V7.1.1 you can add index rules that will allow you to search by providing additional criteria like find “support person”=”carlos” where support person is an XML element or attribute that is in the xml artifacts and has the value carlos. This doesn’t require you to specify an asset attribute but rather an XML element value in the an asset attribute that RAM will look for in an asset artifact. This is a very powerful feature especially for customers who are using RAM to manage their software models or other XML based assets. This ensures you find the assets you are looking for.

The second topic covered in this tutorial is how to share assets with your supply chain or more broadly. Most people share assets by sharing the component or document. What this approach lacks is the context, understanding or common language for how these assets are used, work together or the level of quality or compliance the assets have. By being able to share the asset governance model that defines how these assets can be used and work together, you add another level of usability and value to the individual assets. This ensures the assets you provide and receive are consumable and provide value. RAM v7.1.1 added the ability to create asset libraries.

Watch this tutorial on the Rational Asset Manager Exchange to see how to create XML search rules and package or create asset libraries and their corresponding governance models. Our hope is customers will begin to create their own asset governance models for different domains like the previous one we have shared for Maven. Customers can share these asset libraries on the Rational Asset Manager Exchange so that others can jump start their asset management initiatives for different domains within their organization. We use Maven as an example since this is domain where we have some customers using RAM to visualize and govern their maven component dependencies .